Internet services were suspended across the state of Punjab on Saturday and are still suspended as of now on Sunday, officials confirmed. According to press sources, Amritpal Singh, the leader of Waris Punjab De and a supporter of the Khalistani movement, has been the target of Punjab Police operation.

The Department of Home Affairs and Justice, Government of Punjab, stated that all mobile internet services, all SMS services (aside from banking & mobile recharge), and all dongle services provided on mobile networks, aside from voice calls, shall be suspended. The Punjab Police today conducted a large crackdown on “Waris Punjab De,” detaining 78 activists in the Jalandhar area in response to criticism regarding the allegedly worsening peace and order situation in the state. Amritpal Singh, a pro-Khalistan activist, evaded capture despite a significant police presence in the Jalandhar neighborhood of Shahkot. The police asserted that they had taken 373 ammunition, a revolver, seven 12-bore rifles, and one 315-bore rifle from the demonstrators.

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Is Amritpal Singh still on the run?

The radical preacher Amritpal Singh is still on the run, according to the Punjab Police, who also stated that a big search operation has begun to apprehend the leader of the Waris Punjab De organization.

The statement followed earlier today’s media reports that stated Singh and a number of his allies had been detained by the Punjab Police.

According to a statement from Punjab Police, the state has begun extensive Cordon and Search operations against Waris Punjab De members.

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What led to the Crackdown?

On Thursday, in an anomalous course of events, a group of men armed with swords and guns stormed a police station in Ajnala, on the outskirts of Amritsar, demanding the release of Lovepreet Singh, also known by his alias “Toofan,”.Singh was being held on kidnapping charges and assault on a Chamkaur Sahib-based resident Varinder Singh. Lovepreet Singh alias Toofan, who is a close associate of “Waris Punjab De” leader Amritpal Singh, had turned to activism during the farm agitation at the Delhi border. Lovepreet Singh, a Sikh preacher, and modest farmer has long advocated for Sikh causes.

Amritpal Singh, 30, who has gained notoriety in Punjab over the past six to seven months as a Sikh preacher and infamous sympathizer for Khalistan, was at the epicenter of these events. He claims to be a devoted follower of Bhindranwale, a militant leader who supported Khalistan and was assassinated in the infamous operation Blue Star on June 6, 1984.

Lovepreet Singh was released from jail the following day, but this entire incident has raised numerous issues with Punjabi politics, government, and law and order.

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Who is Amritpal Singh?

Born in 1993, Amritpal Singh Sandhu hails from Jallupur Khera village in Baba Bakala tehsil of Amritsar district. He is said to have studied up to the plus two levels before he left for Dubai for work in 2012. Singh, a 29-year-old Dubai-returned Sikh who recently moved to Punjab, has abruptly entered the religiopolitical scene after taking control of Waris Punjab De, an organization that actor-activist Deep Sidhu founded before his supposed accident caused death in February 2022.

“We (Sikhs) have become a community of slaves” – this is a message Amritpal Singh, the head of Waris Punjab De, is heard proclaiming in most of his speeches.

His surrounding social media activity suggests that he had been advocating for Sikh causes for at least the previous five years or so. He joined the anti-farm law demonstrations, notably the Deep Sidhu-related faction of the movement. According to Deep Sidhu’s statements at the Shambhu Border, his branch of the movement was distinct from the farm unions since he advocated for a more comprehensive political and social reform of Punjab rather than just the repeal of agricultural regulations. He believed that the movement should’ve been carried forward even after the repelling of the controversial farm laws. 

According to Quint, apparently, Amritpal never met Deep Sidhu and the two interacted only through social media.

However, the ministry of home affairs is reported to have told the Punjab government to keep a watch on his activities. Captain Amarinder Singh has asked the government to take action against him and a Shiv Sena faction wants him booked under UAPA. His Twitter account was withheld in India on 7 October 2022, reports The Quint.

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What does the Socio-Political scene in Punjab look like?

There have been a number of political responses to this, with the Shiromani Akali Dal-Amritsar denouncing the crackdown while the Aam Aadmi Party and Congress supported it. Following the announcement of the crackdown on Singh, a number of political figures from various parties have pleaded for peace in Punjab. However, the general public’s perception of him is sharply divided, with supporters applauding his efforts to resuscitate Sikhi and his anti-drug campaign in addition to the enormous crowds at his events. Critics, on the other hand, charge him of usurpation and with attempting to destabilize Punjab.

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Anxieties over the rise of a potential militancy in Punjab?

The Khalistan movement, which was previously seen as more of a foreign diaspora concern, is currently making news in India due to farmer protests, but the subject is becoming more prominent due to the recent series of events and the emergence of Amritpal Singh as a pro-Khalistan leader. Anxieties are being risen along the lines of this crisis turning into a potential threat of militancy in Punjab.

Harjeshwar Pal Singh, an assistant professor of History based in Chandigarh thinks that it will not lead to a rise in militancy because there has been strong criticism within the community against the ways adopted by Amritpal Singh.

Author of Panjab: Journeys through fault line, Amandeep Sandhu enunciates the larger problems which have been plaguing the state and which might have come into the forefront with such issues. The rise of someone like Amritpal Singh, in Sandhu’s opinion, is evidence that numerous governments have historically failed to address various issues at their root.

While the state has been apparently working to put Punjab’s violent history of bloodshed and militancy behind it, these images have brought back memories of those times. Anxieties are being risen along the lines of this crisis turning into a potential threat of militancy in Punjab.

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On 26 February,  hundreds of heavily armed Jewish settlers protected by the Israeli army,  rampaged through the Palestinian village of Huwara, just south of the northern West Bank town of Nablus, ransacking and torching homes and property and killing at least one local resident. According to the Palestinian health ministry, hundreds of people were injured, with many sustaining serious and crippling wounds that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. The rampage in Huwara has been described as the most violent since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.

According to various sources, the settlers had received definitive instructions from government officials telling them “to teach the Palestinians a lesson they wouldn’t forget.”

The settlers, affiliated with the religious Zionist movement, are indoctrinated in a Nazi-like  Talmudic ideology which considers the targeting of innocent noncombatants such as children,  women and the elderly as perfectly legitimate during the time of conflict.

 The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has accused the Israeli government, the most racist and fascist ever,  of backing a rampage in Huwara. Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich was quoted as saying that Huwara needs to be “wiped out and razed to the ground” and that the state of Israel should do it.

Israeli Prime Minister told foreign journalists that Smotrich couldn’t use PR-friendly language to communicate his message, prompting one Israeli journalist to remark that “Netanyahu seemed to  be acting  as PR officer for Smotrich.”

Jewish-Nazism

When this and other writers employed Nazi epithets to describe current Israeli policies and behaviours in the Occupied Palestinian territories, some people, especially Western intellectuals, thought we were exaggerating the level of Israel’s genocidal Jewish barbarianism.

However an honest look at the perpetrators of the Huwara rampage reveals that these people are far from being a small or marginal extremist group, not representing the mainstream Israeli Jewish society.

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In fact, these are the very people who rule Israel today. They are the people of the government. They represent the crème de le crème of the Zionist religious movement in Israel.

Hence, we are not talking here about some wild weed growing uncontrollably in the midst of an otherwise sane society or anything of this sort.

Our erstwhile critics who didn’t like the use of strong epithets to describe Israel, mainly for psychological reasons,  would probably pay more attention to the purported half-full glass rather than the half-empty one.

But in all honesty, there is simply no half-full glass in  Israel today.   Some naïve observers here and there might still think that the international community wouldn’t allow Israel to cross the Rubicon.

Unfortunately,  It has now been proven that neither Israel could be given the benefit of the doubt nor could the so-called international community be entrusted to prevent or even restrain the increasingly brazenly Nazi entity from doing the unthinkable, namely launching a partial or full genocide against the unprotected Palestinians.

Indeed,  the feeble American and European reactions to the Jewish rampage at the village of Huwara proved that the US can not be relied upon to rein in or restrain Jewish Nazism in Palestine.

The US, after all, is the very country that enabled Israel to be what it is and reach this evil level of barbarianism and arrogance of power by funding, defending and constantly optimizing Israeli Nazism.

Hence, relying on Washington to rein in genocidal Israel is merely a futile exercise in naivety, day-dreaming and wishful thinking.

Besides, All that America can offer to force Israel to behave doesn’t really go beyond futile gentle preaching stressing the need to exercise self-restraint and not indulge in incitement and extremism.

But Israel is not restrained by gentle preaching and polite rebuking or even harsh verbal chastisement. Such a toothless discourse will have no effect whatsoever on a shameless violator of international law, but could actually further embolden the Zionist entity even further.

What Israel needs is a thorough de-Nazification which would convince the racist supremacists in occupied Palestine that the recurrent rampages and genocidal savagery against the Palestinian people would have serious consequences on the Israel state.

Huwara rampage : Prova for a real Holucaust?

As someone who is quite familiar with the religious Zionist mindset, I can safely argue that the rampage at Huwara, which represents the cumulative outcome of years of toxic incitement by the Talmudic schools, such as the Merkaz Ha-Rav in West Jerusalem (the CNS of religious Zionism in Israel) is just a mere prova for something to come that is much more ominous, much more and much more genocidal.

Indeed, if these genocidal thugs and killer beasts could do this shamelessly in front of TV cameras from all over the world, just imagine how they would behave and what they would  do to their helpless victims if the area were to be declared a close military Zone and all journalists and cameramen were ordered to leave.

I am saying this because I am completely convinced that the concept of genocide is absolutely and completely compatible with the religious teaching and ideological indoctrination of these people who apparently were spoon-fed this poison since their kindergarten days.

As a journalist who has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially the settler phenomenon, ever since I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1981, I can honestly argue with all honesty and rectitude, that these people represent the Nazis of our time.

I am not eager to put any people down, and I’m absolutely and totally against all forms of anti-Semitism.

But we must call the spade a spade, irrespective of whether we see the proverbial implement in the hands of Da’esh killers, Jewish settlers in Huwara or Vagner mercenaries in Ukraine. If we don’t wake up, if the world doesn’t wake up now, especially after what we saw in  Huwara, when will we wake up?

The Huwara rampage is more than just writing on the wall. It is more than a  dark cloud hanging over the West Bank. The rampage in Huwarra is actually the penultimate step, the sound alarm coming before a real genocide that could be carried out at any moment by these reptile murderers, protected and assisted by the  Israeli army.

Enter the Palestinian Authority

As to Palestinians, they must not allow themselves to be beguiled or sedated by worthless statements coming from the American state department.

The neo-Nazi trio of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will not give a  hoot to worthless statements coming from worthless people in Washington.

In September 1982, the Reagan administration gave solemn assurances to the PLO that no Palestinian refugees in the Beirut region would be harmed if PLO forces left Beirut.

However, when the PLO left, as part of an agreement mediated by the American envoy Phillip Habib, Israel’s Christian allies, the Phallangists, ganged up on the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, south of Beirut, ransacking the two camps and slaughtering more than 3500 innocent men, women and children. Not a single perpetrator was prosecuted or punished for the genocidal massacre.

The Palestinians must not commit the same criminal blunder again, by trusting the US to protect our unarmed civilians from the Nazis of our time.

We need something much more concrete, much more reliable and much more certain. After all, it is our children’s lives at stake! Today, they set homes on fire while children and babies inside.

Tomorrow they will build a huge crematorium to burn our kids in broad daylight while a US State Department would regurgitate the same stale statements about Israel having the right to defend itself!